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Figures released last week show that trouble in and around grounds on match days is down and football violence is no longer considered the ‘English disease’.

As I write, a sell-out crowd is watching the north London derby between Arsenal and Tottenham, while other multi-millionaire footballers will be ready to pull on their shirts for showpiece Premier League clubs.

But the truth is, you really don’t have to look very far to see all is certainly not well for many clubs who look to attract Saturday afternoon crowds.

I took a trip down memory lane last weekend when my sister, her husband and I took our respective children along to see the club I used to sneak through a hole in a fence to watch for free when I was their age.

It was a League Two encounter between Wycombe Wanderers and Rochdale – hardly up there with that London tussle, I know.

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Wycombe have had an awful start to the season but this was the first game charismatic player Gareth Ainsworth was taking charge of as the club’s permanent new manager.

It was the start of rock ‘n roll football, we were told, and, as a nice touch, inflatable guitars were handed out to younger fans to emphasise the point.

The trouble is, no amount of blow-up balloons can quite prepare you for the price of football tickets, even in the fourth tier of English football – £34 for myself and my two children (£21 for me).

A crowd of only just over 3,000 were there to share the fun with us – Wycombe’s lowest for a number of years, I was later told – and, despite no lack of commitment from the home side, they eventually succumbed to a late rather unfortunate deflection.

The solution for my family has been to switch sports.

The dilemma, of course, for clubs like Wycombe is how to attract fans when they simply don’t have the finance to buy a better level of player to turn that commitment into regular wins.

It’s not rocket science to realise it’s going to be an uphill task to attract many families of four to the idea of spending more than £50 seeing your side lose on a regular basis.

For Wycombe, the troubles run even deeper -a successful youth policy, which many of the smaller sides rely on in the hope of producing the next generation of superstars, has been scrapped – because the club says it cannot afford it.

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The solution for my family has been to switch sports.

My local town is home to a highly skilled basketball team that attracts hundreds of spectators on a Friday night. To see them costs us all of £2 for a family of four and we get to see points galore in a cosy indoors arena.

That’s our solution in these tough economic times – unfortunately, though, I fear Wycombe’s is going to have to be about a bit more a bit more than blow-up guitars.